I've spent about ten hours stripping down, cleaning, wire brushing, and reassembling the Castle Front's mechanism. Last night I was able to operate it manually and it more-or-less works. The reels spin freely by hand, but the reel kicker would barely impart enough energy to give them a single rotation.

The toe of the reel kicker is really chewed up, so I dropped it off at my favorite metal fab shop at lunchtime today. They're going to remove and replace the whole foot with a piece of mild steel. Here's a picture.

One of the reel brakes is not with the machine. I found some tempered steel rod of similar diameter and formed it into a reasonable facsimile, but won't be able to test operate it until the kicker is reinstalled.

I picked up the repaired kicker today (they only charged me $10) and installed it. It seems to work properly and the reels were spinning better. I went ahead and disassembled and cleaned the axles and stops and now the reels spin quite well. After cycling it about 100 times I am satisfied with the operation of that part of the mechanism. The mild steel foot doesn't show any significant signs of wear after that small number of cycles, but I'm going to go ahead and order a replacement from board member mrslot1.

Next task is to clean up the inside of the case, clean and check the escalator, and see how it does with nickles running through it. Hopefully I reassembled the reel stack and the payout slides properly. =)

I bought a Harbor Freight sandblasting cabinet on Saturday. It works very well connected to my dust collector system. Made short work of cleaning off the old paint.

I've never done anything like this before, so repainting has been a learning experience. I sprayed all the castings with silver metallic enamel as a base coat, then masked everything that wasn't going to be blue and sprayed that. Re-masked and sprayed the red. Then I hand-painted the black squares, and finished with a Testor's metallic silver paint pen to do all the gingerbread. That paint pen is a mighty fine tool!

I bought a Harbor Freight sandblasting cabinet on Saturday. It works very well connected to my dust collector system. Made short work of cleaning off the old paint.

I've never done anything like this before, so repainting has been a learning experience. I sprayed all the castings with silver metallic enamel as a base coat, then masked everything that wasn't going to be blue and sprayed that. Re-masked and sprayed the red. Then I hand-painted the black squares, and finished with a Testor's metallic silver paint pen to do all the gingerbread. That paint pen is a mighty fine tool!

I can certainly respect the amount of time and effort you have put into this restoration. May I ask why you decided to paint the castings silver rather than polishing the aluminum?

I had a bit of a mishap with the paint yesterday and had to sand and repaint a small section of the blue above the reel windows. I had also missed a section of the shield that was supposed to be red and fixed that. The first coat of clear gloss enamel just went on, so I'm waiting for it to dry now.